Bing Content Submission API Beta Is Now Available

[siteadmin]

Microsoft announced last night that the Bing Content Submission API is now in beta and open to be used by site owners, publishers, webmasters or whatever you cool kids are calling yourselves these days. Microsoft announced this over two years ago and while the company released the URL submission API a while ago, the content submission API has been in a private beta since then.

We knew this was coming, Fabrice Canel from Microsoft told us it would be here soon just a couple of months ago.

The URL submission API allows you to only submit URLs for crawling or re-crawling. It is now new and heck, I've been using the URL submission API here for a while, it works, and works well.

The content submission API is different, it was just launched publicly as a beta yesterday. It not only lets you submit URLs but the HTML that goes along with it. This technically stops the need for BingBot to access the page and crawl the page to see the content. You just push your URL and content to Bing and it will take it and use it in its index. This should save both Bing and your site significant server resources.

Bing shared on its blog post how to use the API, you can read that there. You can fill out this form to be part of this public beta.

At Bing, webmasters don’t have to wait to get their content crawled and indexed. Bing offers webmaster the abilities to tell Bing about the latest changes in their sites, such as providing latest added, updated or deleted content and URLs.

Bing already supports the ability for webmasters to notify Bing about URL changes via its Bing URL submission API (setup guide) but now (under Beta launch) also the ability to notify Bing directly about URL along with content changes via Bing Content Submission API. This will not only help webmasters to reach to more relevant users on Bing but also will reduce BingBot crawl load on their sites. This blog post will provide a generic overview along with step-by-step instruction on adopting the same.

There are Simple Two steps:-
Step 1: Generate an API Key
Step 2: Integrate with your website and start submitting content
You can use any of the below protocols to easily integrate the Webmaster API SubmitContent method into your system

XML request sample

Code: Select all

XML
POST /webmaster/api.svc/pox/SubmitContent?apikey=EEDECC1EA4AE341CC57365E075EBC8B6 HTTP/1.1 
Content-Type: application/xml; charset=utf-8 
Host: ssl.bing.com 

<SubmitContent xmlns="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/Microsoft.Bing.Webmaster.Api"> 
<siteUrl>http://example.com</siteUrl> 
<url>http://example.com/url1.html</url> 
<httpMessage>SFRUUC8xLjEgMjAwIE9LCkRhdGU6IFN1biwgMTAgT2N0IDIwMTcgMjM6MjY6MDcgR01UCkFjY2VwdC1SYW5nZXM6IGJ5dGVzCkNvbnRlbnQtTGVuZ3RoOiAxMwpDb25uZWN0aW9uOiBjbG9zZQpDb250ZW50LVR5cGU6IHRleHQvaHRtbAoKSGVsbG8gd29ybGQh</httpMessage> 
<structuredData></structuredData> 
<dynamicServing>0</dynamicServing>
</SubmitContent>

JSON request sample

Code: Select all

POST /webmaster/api.svc/json/SubmitContent?apikey=EEDECC1EA4AE341CC57365E075EBC8B6 HTTP/1.1 
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 
Host: ssl.bing.com 

{ 
"siteUrl":"http://example.com", 
"url":"http://example.com/url1.html", 
"httpMessage":"SFRUUC8xLjEgMjAwIE9LCkRhdGU6IFN1biwgMTAgT2N0IDIwMTcgMjM6MjY6MDcgR01UCkFjY2VwdC1SYW5nZXM6IGJ5dGVzCkNvbnRlbnQtTGVuZ3RoOiAxMwpDb25uZWN0aW9uOiBjbG9zZQpDb250ZW50LVR5cGU6IHRleHQvaHRtbAoKSGVsbG8gd29ybGQh", 
"structuredData":"", 
"dynamicServing":"0" 
} 

If the URL submission is successful you will receive an http 200 response. This ensures that your pages will be discovered for indexing and if Bing webmaster guidelines are met then the pages will be crawled and indexed in real time.

Using any of the above methods you should be able to directly and automatically let Bing know whenever there are content changes in your website. We encourage you to integrate such solution in your Web Content Management System to let Bing auto discover your new content at publication time.